Self Development

For a while, I meditated on the idea of improvement. How do we become better at things?

How did the experts become experts? After all, nearly everyone who is an expert started out as a beginner with minimal skills.

Inspired partially by Cal Newport's Deep Work, I thought about the idea of deliberate practice. Briefly, deliberate practice is when you spend a lot of focus and effort on the thing you're trying to get good at and constantly taking in feedback and reflecting on how to improve even further.

Deliberate practice takes many forms depending on your profession. If you want to become a better singer, you have to learn to hold yourself accountable and practice. You have to routinely push yourself out of your comfort zone. If you want to get better at playing the guitar or programming or do better in classes etc etc. you need to take an active approach to improving a specific subskill.

For example, it's not just enough to shoot 1,000 free throws and improve just by shooting so many. You need to routinely check your form and ensure that over the long run, you're eliminating careless mistakes and small errors that separate you from greatness.

I've already written before about my experience about posting everyday to become a better, more consistent writer. As I look at my own writing, I want to take several forms of art and truly excel in them. To do that, I'm embarking on a posting journey and working deliberately on improving my haikus.

Haikus are traditional Japanese poems that are comprised of 17 syllables. Thematically, these poems centered on observations of the natural world. The 17 syllables are divided into 3 lines, the first line containing 5 syllables, the second line containing 7 syllables, and the final line containing 5 syllables.

I don't intend on blasting through 100 haikus a day to reach my goal. I plan to get there surely and in my own time. I'll write down my thought processes behind a few of my haikus or when I feel like I've made an insightful discovery. The goal is that you can take away something and learn from my experiences too.

I'll be submitting my haikus to other publications and will backlink them as I go, creating a chain. I'm starting my 1,000 haiku streak tomorrow.

Start here:

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